Focus

The OECD welcomes the release of voluntary G20 peer reviews of Indonesia and Italy’s efforts to phase out and rationalise their inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies at the 2nd meeting of G20 Energy Transitions Working Group under the Japanese Presidency in Toyama, Japan.

This report explores recent developments in environmental cost-benefit analysis (CBA). This is defined as the application of CBA to projects or policies that have the aim of environmental improvement or are actions that affect the natural environment as an indirect consequence.

What is urban sprawl and how does it impact the environment? This report uses new datasets to compute indicators for more than 1,100 urban areas in 29 OECD countries over the period 1990-2014 and provides a new perspective to the nature of urban sprawl and its causes and environmental, social and economic consequences.

As the world’s cities are growing, urban sprawl is getting worse. An new OECD study of 1,100 cities shows 60% of space is now low-density. This erratic city growth is damaging the environment. What can policy makers and governments do to move towards more sustainable cities?